The image forming process of the electrophotographic method is widely used, for example, in an image forming apparatus such as a copier, a facsimile device and a printer. An image forming apparatus that operates using the electrophotographic method executes a series of processes such as a charging process uniformly charging a surface of an image carrier such as a photoreceptor, an exposure process irradiating the surface of the image carrier with light to form an electrostatic latent image, a developing process attaching the charged developer to the electrostatic latent image to form a developer image on the image carrier, a transfer process transferring the developer image to a recording medium such as a sheet, and a fusing process fusing the transferred developer image onto the recording medium.
However, in the transfer process, it is difficult for the entire developer image to be transferred from the image carrier to the recording medium so that it is possible for developer to remain on the image carrier. Therefore, in the image forming apparatus, a cleaning device is incorporated that removes, from the image carrier, the unwanted developer (or residual developer) remained after the transfer process. A cleaning device of this kind is disclosed, for example, in Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication No. 2006-58729 (Patent Document 1).
For the above-described conventional cleaning device, there is a problem that noise is generated.
In view of the above-described problem, a purpose of the present invention is to provide a cleaning device, an image forming unit and an image forming apparatus that are able to suppress noise generation.